InSight: recognizing humans without face recognition

Wearable cameras and displays, such as the Google Glass, are around the corner. This paper explores techniques that jointly leverage camera-enabled glasses and smartphones to recognize individuals in the visual surrounding. While face recognition would be one approach to this problem, we believe that it may not be always possible to see a person's face. Our technique is complementary to face recognition, and exploits the intuition that colors of clothes, decorations, and even human motion patterns, can together make up a "fingerprint". When leveraged systematically, it may be feasible to recognize individuals with reasonable consistency. This paper reports on our attempts, with early results from a prototype built on Android Galaxy phones and PivotHead's camera-enabled glasses. We call our system InSight.